Appeals Court Upholds Federal Law On Executions

By ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: December 11, 2002

A federal appeals panel upheld the legality of the federal death penalty yesterday, reversing a Manhattan federal judge who said in July that the law was unconstitutional in light of the growing number of death-row exonerations.

In what was the first judicial ruling challenging the federal death penalty, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan had written that capital punishment was ''tantamount to foreseeable, state-sponsored murder of innocent human beings.''

In reversing that ruling, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit did not consider the evidence that influenced Judge Rakoff: the growing number of cases in which DNA and other evidence demonstrated wrongful convictions.

Instead, the panel deferred to earlier decisions by the Supreme Court that considered the risk that innocent people might be executed. The panel wrote that wrongful convictions have always been a possibility, and that ''binding precedents of the Supreme Court prevent us from finding capital punishment unconstitutional based solely on a statistical or theoretical possibility that a defendant might be innocent.''

The ruling arose from a case in which two men are awaiting trial on federal charges in a drug-related killing in the Bronx. Lawyers for the two men, Alan Quinones and Diego Rodriguez, said yesterday that they expected to seek a review by the full 13-member appeals court and if necessary an appeal to the Supreme Court.

Prosecutors have accused the two men of being partners in a Bronx heroin ring. The government says the men tied, tortured and killed a man who they correctly suspected was a government informant. Both have pleaded not guilty.

The former United States attorney in Manhattan, Mary Jo White, declined at first to seek the death penalty in the case, but she was overruled last year by Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Judge Rakoff raised questions about the death penalty a year ago in response to evidence introduced by the defendants' lawyers. He issued a final ruling in July, writing that the federal death penalty violated the Constitution's guarantee of due process because an ''undue risk of executing innocent people exists.''

He cited the cases of 12 inmates on death row who were exonerated through DNA evidence, and he referred to a study by researchers at Columbia University and elsewhere finding serious flaws in the way death penalty cases are handled.

Judge Rakoff also wrote that the most powerful evidence of wrongful convictions had emerged since the federal death penalty was enacted in 1994. The Supreme Court has not examined the relevant due-process issues since 1993 and might view them differently now, Judge Rakoff wrote.

The appeals panel challenged that point yesterday, writing in its unanimous decision that the Supreme Court has held that ''once an individual has exhausted his available legal remedies, the due-process clause no longer entitles him to an opportunity to demonstrate his innocence.''

The panel also cited evidence suggesting that legislators had been aware of the risks of executing the innocent for centuries.

Some lawyers said yesterday that the Supreme Court might well be swayed by the growing number of death penalty defendants being exonerated. Those cases have already gathered considerable political strength, prompting the governors of Illinois and Maryland to order moratoriums on executions. In a July 2001 speech, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who has provided the deciding vote upholding death sentences in cases before the Supreme Court, said she was troubled by the number of times prisoners were being exonerated after being condemned.

The appeals panel ruling does not affect a ruling by a second federal judge who ruled the federal death penalty unconstitutional in September. That judge, William K. Sessions III of the Federal District Court in Burlington, Vt., based his ruling on different grounds.

''The Supreme Court has not confronted the significance of the exonerations of the last 10 years,'' said Christopher Dunn, a lawyer with the New York Civil Liberties Union, which has filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the defendants in the New York case. ''This is the first case that has directly dealt with those issues.''